Twitter just uploaded its latest performance report. With Elon Musk’s takeover still cued behind a mountain of paperwork and documentation, Twitter’s report is much more transactional this time, compared to its previous quarterly updates.

According to Twitter:

“In light of the proposed transaction with Mr. Musk, as is customary during the pendency of an acquisition, Twitter will not be hosting a conference call, issuing a shareholder letter, or providing financial guidance in conjunction with its first-quarter 2022 earnings release. For further detail and discussion of our financial performance please refer to our upcoming quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2022.”

Plain Black & White

The data is pretty much the same, just that there are almost no visuals included this time, making it a rather plain and boring thing to go through. Nevertheless, it’s the insights that are important, which performance reports luckily always have plenty of.

First up is Twitter usage. Twitter’s monetizable daily active user count is now 229 million, up from its Q4 count of 217 million. This is the best growth Twitter has experienced so far within its last two reports, adding up to a total of 12 million new users. This growth happened despite Twitter being banned in Russia, though Twitter did admit that it had been miscounting its mDAU for two straight years due to personal oversights.

Next up is revenue. Twitter brought in an additional $1.2 billion for the quarter, marking a 16% YoY increase, which is a tad short of expectations. Some of this has been impacted by the Ukraine crisis, but even then, one chart on the report clearly shows how $1.2B in Q1 isn’t likely to cause any sort of major shift for the app. Twitter further notes that all subscription and other revenue channels only totaled $94 million, which also translates as a 31% decrease YoY. This suggests that the app’s newer options, like Twitter Blue, aren’t gaining as much traction as they would’ve hoped. They may not even develop into the supplementary income streams that Twitter envisioned.

Twitter also mentions that given Musk’s pending acquisition, it’s not providing any forward-looking guidance and is withdrawing all previously provided goals. Under new-new leadership, what exactly would be Twitter’s future? While it continues to add users, more people doesn’t always equate to more growth. Innovation and product enhancements also aren’t cutting it as much as the platform needs them to. Twitter just can’t seem to catch a break in defining itself, other than as being a cesspit of negative talk and rant statuses.

In our opinion, Twitter’s main issue had always been with discovery – there’s a lot of content on Twitter, 500 million daily Tweets is nothing to scoff at, but what Twitter fails to consistently do is translate these Tweets into more compulsive and engaging experiences that are relevant to each user.

It has the Spaces tab, is among the first platforms to announce NFT integrations, and has even improved its visual content editing and upload capabilities, but it just always seems to fall shy of the mark. Again, avoiding repetitive emphasis, content exploration and discoverability play a large part here – Twitter’s algorithm needs an overhaul.

The Wrap

Clearly, there are a lot of bumps that Elon will have to flatten out, which he thinks he can. Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. While becoming a haven of ‘Free Speech’ will definitely garner it a little extra attention, such becomes increasingly less prominent in an era that’s slowly being dotted by obligations and taking firm stances on public issues.

In short, Twitter is in a difficult position, where it can either choose to fight or fly to survive. Perhaps other paths are yet to be determined? Either way, it will have to choose one. Which do you think is best for Twitter to take?

Subscribe to our ‘Bottoms Up!’ Newsletter. Get the latest social media blogs about news, updates, trends, and effective social media strategies to take your business to the highest level from Tristan Ahumada and Jeff Pfitzer.

Sources 

https://bit.ly/3KoniK1